Christine Dimroth

What word-level knowledge can adult learners acquire after minimal exposure to a new language?

Abstract Discussions about the adult L2 learning capacity often take as their starting point stages where considerable L2 knowledge has already been accumulated. This paper probes the absolute earliest stages of learning and investigates what lexical knowledge adult learners can extract from complex, continuous speech in an unknown language after minimal exposure and without any help. Dutch participants were exposed to naturalistic but controlled audiovisual input in Mandarin Chinese, in which item frequency and gestural highlighting were manipulated. The results from a word recognition task showed that adults are able to draw on frequency to recognize disyllabic words appearing only eight times in continuous speech. The findings from a sound-to-picture matching task revealed that the mapping of meaning to word form requires a combination of cues: disyllabic words accompanied by a gesture were correctly assigned meaning after eight encounters. Overall, the study suggests that the adult learning mechanism is a considerably more powerful than typically assumed in the SLA literature drawing on frequency, gestural cues and syllable structure. Even in the absence of pre-existing knowledge about cognates and sound system to bootstrap and boost learning, it deals efficiently with very little, very complex input.

Finiteness in children and adults learning Dutch

This paper deals with the acquisition of finiteness in children acquiring Dutch as their first language and adults acquiring Dutch as their second language. The authors distinguish between the semantic concept of finiteness and its morpho-syntactic marking. Given that utterances are used to express illocutionary force, they argue that finiteness is the carrier of the pragmatic function of assertion. As such it relates the descriptive content of an utterance to its topic component. It is shown that for the expression of finiteness child and adult learners rely on this pragmatic function of assertion at subsequent stages of acquisition. At the so-called Conceptual Ordering Stage, i.e. before target-adequate morphological markings become productive, learners establish the assertive relation by a closed class of linking elements which contains elements expressing positive or negative assertion, modal phrases and scope particles. At the Finite Linking Stage assertion marking grammaticalises. Elements of the target functional category of auxiliaries come to be used as a grammatical linking device whereas scope particles and other target adverbial elements do no longer occur as independent linking elements. While the illocutionary linking elements of the Conceptual Ordering Stage are adjuncts, auxiliary verbs are part of a functional category system. As is the case in the target language, they function as the head of a head-complement structure at the Finite Linking Stage.

Intonational Means to Mark Verum Focus in German and French

German and French differ in a number of aspects. Regarding the prosody-pragmatics interface, German is said to have a direct focus-to-accent mapping, which is largely absent in French – owing to strong structural constraints. We used a semi-spontaneous dialogue setting to investigate the intonational marking of Verum Focus, a focus on the polarity of an utterance in the two languages (e.g. the child IS tearing the banknote as an opposite claim to the child is not tearing the banknote). When Verum Focus applies to auxiliaries, pragmatic aspects (i.e. highlighting the contrast) directly compete with structural constraints (e.g. avoiding an accent on phonologically weak elements such as monosyllabic function words). Intonational analyses showed that auxiliaries were predominantly accented in German, as expected. Interestingly, we found a high number of (as yet undocumented) focal accents on phrase-initial auxiliaries in French Verum Focus contexts. When French accent patterns were equally distributed across information structural contexts, relative prominence (in terms of peak height) between initial and final accents was shifted towards initial accents in Verum Focus compared to non-Verum Focus contexts. Our data hence suggest that French also may mark Verum Focus by focal accents but that this tendency is partly overridden by strong structural constraints.

Fokuspartikeln in Lernervarietäten: Ein Analyserahmen und einige Beispiele

SummaryFocus particles are words such as only, even, also and similar ones. In many ways, they behave like the negation in that their particular meaning contribution may afffect the entire sentence in which they occur or only a selected part of it. They belong, again like the negation, to the earliest linguistic devices in first as well as in second language acquisition, but there is hardly any systematical investigation of how they are used in learner language; even in the case of negation, which is relatively well explored, the particular scopal properties are often ignored. The present paper develops develops a general framework to their analysis, based on earlier theoretical work by Jacobs, König and other; this framework is then applied to the learner of a Polish learner of German.

Prosodic and lexical marking of contrast in L2 Italian

We investigated the second language (L2) acquisition of pragmatic categories that are not as consistently and frequently encoded in the L2 than in the first language (L1). Experiment 1 showed that Italian speakers linguistically highlighted affirmative polarity contrast (e.g. The child ate the candies following after The child did not eat the candies) in 34.3% of the cases, by producing a nuclear pitch accent on the finite verb (i.e. verum focus accent). Experiment 2 revealed that high-proficient German and Dutch non-native speakers of Italian linguistically encoded polarity contrast more frequently, either using a verum focus accent (German) or lexical markers (Dutch). This corresponds closely to the patterns preferred in their native languages. Our results show L1 transfer on three levels: (1) the relevance of the pragmatic category (i.e. marking polarity contrast on the assertion component), (2) the linguistic markers to encode polarity contrast and (3) the phonetic implementation of the intonational marking. These three levels of transfer have implications for how non-native speakers acquire the L2 discourse organizational principles and the linguistic markers to encode them.

Functional categories in learner language

Research on spontaneous processes of language acquisition has shown that early learner systems are based on lexical structures. At some point in acquisition this lexical-semantic system is given up in favour of a target-like functional category system. This work deals with the driving forces behind the acquisition of the functional properties of inflection, word-order variation, definiteness and agreement.

The influence of finiteness and lightness on verb placement in L2 German: Comparing child and adult learners:

In this study, verb placement with respect to negation is investigated in elicited production and elicited sentence imitation data collected with child second language (L2) learners of German. These data are compared to published data from adult L2 learners, which were collected with the same elicitation materials and were re-analysed for the current study. Results show that similar developmental stages can be observed in child and adult learners. In particular, contrary to previous findings, child L2 learners who had not yet fully acquired finiteness (subject–verb agreement) showed a preference for placing lexical verbs to the right of negation, rather than in a raised position to the left of negation. This pattern was observed for nonfinite and finite lexical verbs, but not for finite auxiliaries, suggesting that children, like adults, may pass through a phase where lightness influences verb placement preferences more strongly than does finiteness.

Learner varieties in language teaching

The paper addresses the question of whether and how knowledge about processes of untutored second language acquisition could be exploited for language teaching. The first part deals with the difficulties of assigning learners to the stages proposed in different types of stage models for language development. Such stage models mainly list communicative potentials or structural properties of learner varieties in their presumed order of acquisition but do not necessarily help to understand the driving forces and stumble blocks in language learning under different circumstances.The second part of the paper presents findings from the acquisition of finiteness in L2 German. In this well studied domain quite some insights have been gained into the logic of the acquisition process and its variation attested in learners at different ages and with different language backgrounds. An attempt is made to show how classroom learners could be systematically guided onto the most advantageous of the developmental routes attested in untutored acquisition.

The influence of discourse context on children’s ordering of “new” and “old” information

Abstract Adult speakers typically order referents that have been previously mentioned in the discourse (“old” referents) before newly introduced referents (“new” referents). But 3–5-year-olds acquiring German exhibit a “new-old” preference in a task involving question-answer sequences (Narasimhan, Bhuvana and Christine Dimroth. 2008. Word order and information status in child language. Cognition 107. 317–329). Here we ask whether we can change 4–5-year-olds’ new-old preference by manipulating the context in order to encourage connected discourse. Findings show that discourse context changes children’s new-old preference. Children produce the new-old order in fluent utterances and the old-new order in non-fluent utterances. Adult controls overwhelmingly prefer the old-new order, even more so when the weight (number of syllables) of the old referent label is greater than that of the new referent label. Our study demonstrates that although cognitive and communicative biases may influence children’s ordering patterns in non-adult-like ways, such patterns are not categorical, but are flexibly influenced by factors such as discourse context.

Focusing Functional Elements: Affirmative Particles and Verum Focus in First Language Acquisition of German

ABSTRACT We examine whether German children attach an adultlike relevance to the pragmatic category of polarity contrast (e.g., In my picture the child IS eating the candies following after In my picture the child is not eating the candies) with linguistic expressions (i.e., the affirmative particles schon/doch/wohl ‘indeed’ and accented auxiliary verbs, known as verum focus) that are frequent in adult speech. A picture-difference task with 4–6-year-olds and an adult control group shows that both groups mark polarity contrast with similar frequency but with strikingly different means: The adults produced verum focus; the children most often used particles. Moreover, the use of polarity-related expressions competes with structures that are never used by adults but are nevertheless adapted to the information structure context at hand. Overall, our findings suggest that from the repertoire of context-adapted solutions, children prefer structures that are conceptually and formally easier and maximally transparent.